Fueled by info, UP man seeks more answers

For Jaideep Kumar Gupta, from Bilaspur in Uttar Pradesh, the rather simple task of getting a cooking gas cylinder often turned into a troublesome chore, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 8, 2009, 01:23:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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For Jaideep Kumar Gupta, from Bilaspur in Uttar Pradesh, the rather simple task of getting a cooking gas cylinder often turned into a troublesome chore.

First, the LPG (Liquefied petroleum gas) dealer insisted that a refill would be only available after 21 days. Secondly, the dealer insisted there was a shortage of supply and that there was no discount for picking up the cylinder from the warehouse. Followed by some other evasive answers.

Tired, 38-year-old Gupta —nominated for National RTI Awards in the citizens’ category — filed an RTI application to know whether Indane had a 21-day gap rule for booking cylinders.

What he found amazed him.

Indane, who have an office in Noida, clarified that there was no rule that said a gas cylinder could be booked only after 21 days of the delivery of the previous one.

Adding that there had been no shortage in the supply of LPG cylinders to the dealers from its end — contrary to the dealers’ frequent claims.

Another RTI application, filed by Gupta, revealed that Indane gave a discount of Rs 8 per cylinder, in UP, to the customers who picked up the cylinder from their dealer’s warehouse.

“Most of the people in Bilaspur pick up their cylinders from the warehouse, which means that the dealers have been cheating the customers all these years. Now they can’t,” he said.

It may be true elsewhere, too.

Off late, LPG dealerships of public-sector oil and gas companies have become a bane for most people.

The problems range from a deliberately broken system of booking gas cylinders to delays in supplying it.

Another RTI application by Gupta has exposed that “almost half of the chemist shops in Uttar Pradesh are without a pharmacist even though it’s mandatory to have a one”.

He is now trying to expose irregularities in drug distribution in government hospitals, which mostly claim that they don’t have the stock to supply free medicines.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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